EA - Driving Application Portfolio Management

One of the biggest challenges for today's enterprise is to efficiently align their business needs to their IT investments enabling higher profits, efficient enterprise, happy customers, agile businesses etc. If we look around, businesses are constantly looking for answers like "Does my IT systems perform as per my business needs?" or "What are the systems which needs to be automated in priority considering the changing business environment?"

Continuation of current business challenges like inefficient processes, duplication of data, redundant systems, and obsolete information will result in poor productivity, complex process automation and integration issues, missed business opportunities etc. In this scenario a sound Enterprise Architecture practice will differentiate an organization with its competitors in terms of strategic advantage and an upper hand due to availability of critical knowledge points for quick decision making.

Enterprise Modeling and Architecture tries to answer some of these business issues by enabling visualization, analysis and communication of the "Enterprise" Information.

Let's first define an enterprise as a complex system consisting of people, process, information and technology working within socio-cultural boundaries to achieve the defined organizational goals.

Subsequently Enterprise Architecture is defined as a set of descriptions and modeling methods describing the blueprint of organization's information structure; classified around a given framework, enabling the stakeholders to use it as a strategic tool for decision making and management support.

Enterprise Architectures would typically include baseline architecture, target architecture, and a transition plan to reach the target from the baseline. Enterprise Architecture is at the minimum documented using the following architectural models:

•Business architecture - The idea here is to document and visualize the business aspects like vision, mission, goals, strategies, and underlying tactics and associate the same to the business process models, roles and business functions.•Information architecture/Data Architecture - defines what information needs to be made available to accomplish the business mission.•Application architecture - focuses on the portfolio of applications required to support the business mission and information needs of the enterprise. The next level of abstraction would be to identify the business components and services which can be associated to multiple applications in the enterprise.•Technology architecture - defines the technology services needed to support the application portfolio of the business.

Key ingredients for a sound Enterprise Architecture practice would require use of:

On the same hand, Portfolio Management atleast at the architecture level also involves an understanding of the application landscape of the organization by collating the information at a centralized location and enable analysis of the data.

Also, Portfolio Management exercise to be successful will require a given application/system to be analyzed from various dimensions:

1) Application and it own Attributes : Information for an application for e.g. Application Cost (License, Maintenance, Rental etc.), application functions performed, application type (Core, Line etc.) is relevant information for understanding the application's cost and the functionality it provides. 2) Application and its underlying technologies: Application portfolio should also contain information about which technology is supporting which application. This is helpful when deciding upon portfolio modernization and taking sunset decisions on certain applications.3) Application and Business Process/Functions it support: This is one of the prime analysis points for APM. How an application support the various Business Processes and infact the Business Objectives of the organization. A single dimension analysis might show that an application is very costly to maintain and decide upon modernization or sun setting the same, however an analysis for business process support can reveal an application's core nature and effect on business with any downtime or performance issues might be quite significant for an early sunset. Application analysis across process will also bring out integration requirements across applications or an opportunity of soafication/creation of composite applications. 4) Application and Roles it supports: Another dimension to keep a note of is the various roles which are affected by that application. Roles in combination with process and cost will be able to identify the need for an application to be modified/sunset/modernize etc.

Portfolio Management is therefore an activity which can be one of the offshoots of a well defined Enterprise Architecture Metadata where the Application Architecture is defined and linked to dimensions like cost, process, objectives, roles, location, technology etc. A methodology based on this multiple dimension analysis of an application provides enormous value add for an Application Portfolio assessment exercise.

Popular White Paper On This Topic

Related White Papers

1 Comments

I am conducting a survey for a Global Manufacturing firm; the objective of this survey is to ask responders about the applications they are using in their day-to-day operations. This exercise is the part of Global Application portfolio Management. Keeping the end goal (APM) in mind I am trying to establish various attributes, for the survey, from business users’ perspective as well as IT perspective.

I was wondering if you can help me with what attributes I should look for while asking the stakeholders as well as users(responders), in the survey so that they can become the part of end goal (APM).
Warm Regards,
Swapnil Badkur

Disclaimer: Blog contents express the viewpoints of their independent authors and
are not reviewed for correctness or accuracy by
Toolbox for IT. Any opinions, comments, solutions or other commentary
expressed by blog authors are not endorsed or recommended by
Toolbox for IT
or any vendor. If you feel a blog entry is inappropriate,
click here to notify
Toolbox for IT.

The time has come to be really serious about aligning your enterprise roadmap or architecture to execution and montoring for ...
more

The time has come to be really serious about aligning your enterprise roadmap or architecture to execution and montoring for overall enterprise agility. I will cover the above topics with reference to experiences and best practices currently prevalent in this domain.
less

Receive the latest blog posts:

Share Your Perspective

Share your professional knowledge and experience with peers. Start a blog on Toolbox for IT today!